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Comment by hvs | Hacker News Reader

It would seem to me (i.e. someone who knows none of the details of IBM's internal business) that if IBM is so sure that its mainframes are so much better than using "cloud" services, then they should be building a cloud solution on those mainframes to compete with the Amazons, Microsofts, and Googles of the world. It's really not that different from the lease model with their mainframes (which they invented, I believe) and they would actually make their systems somewhat relevant again.

But I'm sure that I just grossly oversimplified the problems that they are facing.

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What IBM's mainframes do directly, and what the sales guys do push aggressively given half a chance, is what's now called "private cloud": hosting virtual-machine instances which can be quickly provisioned or shut down, on hardware owned or rented by the customer. This is what Amazon reportedly just sold to the CIA, for example.

As to experience, the mainframe guys have been doing "private cloud" on a small scale since the early 1970s, via VM/370 and its successors. Current versions can easily host dozens of VMs on a single hardware machine, running several guest OSes, including Linux.

IBM is betting on the private cloud, that is, companies running their own AWS type system internally.

I guess my point was that the advantage of the cloud is that you can start small and scale as needed. If you have to buy the whole cloud yourself, you don't really get that advantage of it.

For mainframe customers like banks, stock exchanges etc, running "in the cloud" is just not an option due to availability and security, so pushing mainframes as a cloud service doesn't make much sense.

This is why IBM is betting on the private cloud.

> so pushing mainframes as a cloud service doesn't make much sense.

I find this hilariously ironic.

The big impacts are in North Carolina, Minnesota and Austin. They are the engineering centers for the x86 servers (commodity, nobody wants high end design in these anymore), and the pSeries (AIX/POWER) and iSeries (AS/400) stuff. All of these are dying businesses with declining market. The AIX line got a boost for a few years with the demise of Sun, but the trend is away from Unix to Linux.

Mainframes are a different animal -- that HQ is in NY. Supposedly they are making money.

http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/z/solutions/cloud/

They are. IBM's mainframe business is quickly becoming a dinosaur, cloud or not.

The furlough is a way to prevent another round of layoffs. By furloughing a division, you can save X%. You cant have two rounds of layoffs within 3 months and not destroy existing projects.

People have been calling mainframes "dinosaurs" since the 1990s at least. They still keep selling. The mainframe division was the only hardware division that is still showing growth, according to the article.

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